Walk the Travels of Evliya Çelebi, Constantinople to Erzurum

The Ottoman road east

Evliya Çelebi leaves Constantinople and follows the old road through Anatolia to Erzerum, recording mosques, mountains, markets, tombs, hot springs and improbable local stories. It is less a march than a seventeenth-century Ottoman world observed from the saddle.

Evliya Çelebi spent some forty years travelling the Ottoman Empire and beyond, and wrote it all into his Book of Travels, the Seyahatname, one of the longest travel accounts ever written. This journey follows his road east from Constantinople: across the Bosphorus to Gebze, past Lake Sapanca, through Bolu and Amasya, and up onto the high plateau to the fortress city of Erzurum.

He is less interested in getting anywhere than in everything he passes. Mosques, markets, hot springs, local dishes, shrines and the stories people told him about them all go in. The English text is the nineteenth-century translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, whose spellings, like Amasia and Erzerum, are kept here.